Today being the national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., I have been thinking a little bit about my childhood growing up mostly in Alabama during the 1960's, during the years when the civil rights movement was led by Martin Luther King. For two of those years -- two of the most tumultuous years, from 1962 to 1964 -- my family was actually in Nashville, while my mother was in graduate school following my parents' divorce. The rest of that time I was in schools that were good schools, in an area of the state that was generally very enlightened as compared with California's stereotype of Alabama and, indeed, as compared with the reality of some other parts of the state.
My memories are not those of someone who grew up surrounded by poverty and racism, which was the stereotype of Alabama that I encountered when I left the state in 1972 to become an undergraduate in Berkeley, California. Nor was Berkeley the exclusively left wing radical place that was the stereotype I encountered whenever I went back to Alabama for a visit. I can't say that my experience, or my memories, are typical for either Alabama in the 1960's or Berkeley in the 1970's. I offer this post as one person's experience, and one person's memories, coming to mind on this particular day.
My family was back in Alabama for the summer, between two school years in Nashville, in August, 1963, when King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. It was the summer after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the summer before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was 9 years old that summer, and I remember things like playing with dolls and with plastic toy soldiers and having a crush on a little boy my age who lived nearby -- typical kids in summer.
My parents had divorced two years earlier, which was not yet common in the 1960's in the "Bible Belt". The previous year, my younger brother encountered one little boy whose parents would not allow him to play with my brother because they disapproved of divorce, and another little boy that he had wanted to play with who had turned out to be black, and neither set of parents were quite sure what to do about it. The school in Nashville was a recently integrated elementary school. At one point, for our art lessons, a teacher had our class divided up in pairs and draw each other's picture. The girl I was paired with was black, and I was not sure how to draw a black child. When I finished, the white teacher commented about my picture of the black student, "She isn't that pretty, is she?" Right in front of her!
Because my parents were divorced, my mother worked and studied full time, and we had black full-time maids who took care of my brother and me when our mother was not home. That accounted for our childcare all day during the summer, when school was not in session, and after school hours the rest of the year. At one point, soon after the divorce, she had hired a white maid and then fired her for telling us dirty jokes and not cleaning the house. Our first year in Nashville, she had hired a white high school student to take care of us after school and then fired her because she got pregnant and married while in high school, and my mother had thought she too was a bad moral influence. The black maids we had were the only people who seemed to live up to my mother's expectations, and she eventually would not even consider a white person for the job!
My mother supervised child welfare for our county, working with abused children, adoptions, and girls who back then were called "unwed mothers". I doubt that they call them that any more. Perhaps because of having once worked with public housing and having greater awareness of public assistance, she insisted on paying Social Security even for those who would rather have the cash to meet their immediate needs. When the buses went on strike, she would drive our maid all the way home in the evening and pick her up at her house the next morning. But the jobs did not pay much.
One time, when I was about 6 years old, I did 2 paint-by-numbers oil
paintings of Mickey Mouse and set them on a chair to dry. I didn't
tell anybody the wet oil paint was on the chair. Our maid sat down and
got the oil paint on her dress, probably one of 2 or 3 dresses she owned. When she wore the same dress later, my
mother was apologetic and wanted to pay to replace the dress I had
ruined, but the maid said no. "That's my Mickey Mouse dress," she
said. People asked her what that was, and she would say, "That's my
Mickey Mouse. My children painted that Mickey Mouse for me."
At one point, my mother needed to drive to Montgomery for the day for a meeting and she wanted my brother and me to go along, together with the same maid. Part of my mother's job involved removing children from abusive homes, and there were constant threats from some of those parents to take my brother and me away from her in return. She eventually learned to live with the threats, and the threats rarely had any validity. But when the threats first started, she was afraid to leave us at home that day while she was out of town, and decided to take us with her. She thought about asking the maid to wear a uniform -- not that she would have had a uniform, of course. But she showed up wearing what truly must have been her Sunday best, or perhaps even a new dress she had bought for the occasion of the trip to Montgomery, and my mother was touched by how important the trip had seemed to her.
I remember the impact of poverty and ignorance. During that summer of 1963, we had a different maid who sat and ate cornstarch out of the box while she watched TV. I told my mother about it, and she didn't believe me until one day she came home and found 2 empty cornstarch boxes in the trash on the same day. One day she drove the maid home and met her 2 children, by 2 different fathers, and asked her why she ate cornstarch. "It'll keep you from getting pregnant," she said. Apparently it wasn't working very well. "Won't it make you sick?" my mother asked. "It'll give you cancer," the young girl answered. "Where did you hear that it will keep you from getting pregnant?" My mother asked. "I read it in a love story magazine," she said. The black love story magazines, we came to learn, were a different thing from anything else we encountered. There were other instances of ignorance. If I started to recount them all, I would sound racist for dwelling on it. The point is the lack of education.
But when I talked back to one of them, saying "You're not my mother!" when she told me to do something, she answered, "You are my children! You're my children when I'm here!" And, many years later, when my brother once got mad and decided to take a parental tone with me, it was done in black dialect. I came to terms with it in my early twenties, when the teacher in an acting workshop told me, after an acting improvisation, "You have a sweet black quality to your acting, like Bessie Smith." I took it as a compliment, as I am sure it was intended as one, meaning a soulful quality a bit different from most young white actresses. I don't think it is very noticeable to most people. But so many hours spent with black maids during my childhood rubbed off on me to some extent.
Through the summers, during the ironing, the protest marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. were on TV. Especially during the late 1960's, we didn't dare ask them not to watch. I watched them too, not always having room to think about reaction. I doubt that my attitudes were any different from other white kids my age when I was in elementary school, and I doubt that my mother's were much different then either, but I know that they changed as I grew up.
There were bomb scares in the Nashville schools when I was 9 years old, phone calls from people angry over integration. We evacuated the school several times, one time standing out in the rain and later moving into a nearby church while police searched for the bomb that I don't think was ever really there. We had had nuclear war drills the previous year, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, because Oakridge National Labs in Tennessee was thought to be a potential target in a war, and we had been told that missiles from Cuba might possibly reach Tennessee, so we thought we were near a target if there had been a nuclear war. I don't know what going out into the hallway and ducking our heads down was actually supposed to accomplish in a nuclear war, but I guess it made the teachers feel better.
Then there was the day when I was out on a school playground, in the same school that had the bomb scares, and news came that the president had been shot in Dallas. Nine years old, I didn't understand that they would quickly swear in the vice-president and continue on with the government. My first thoughts were that now that we did not have President Kennedy to protect us, the Russians would probably bomb us right away, so I thought that we would all be killed. It was not long before the adults were laughing out loud at my childhood ideas.
On TV, reporters were asking people where they were when they heard that the president had been shot, and saying that people would remember all their lives where they were when they heard that news. I kept telling people I was on the playground at school and, for some reason, they thought that was funny too, but I do remember where I was when I heard that news. I do not remember where I was in later years when I heard that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot, or years even later, when other presidents were shot and yet lived. There was something so unexpected to it in the early 1960's. Perhaps all of us -- children and adults alike -- were a little bit shell-shocked by rapid change. The Beatles came on the scene from England, a country whose people we had seen on TV broadcasts following the Kennedy Assassination, and it seemed to be the great escape of the decade, something else new and yet something quite harmless, songs about love.
Schools were integrated in a rapid series of changes, motivated by genuine public interest and sometimes also motivated by judicial arrogance. A plan to move teachers instead of moving students was short-lived, and some of the white teachers who had been assigned to the black school came back looking as if they had aged 5 years in a period of months. They described students coming to high school with knives, guns, and that sort of thing. The "Freedom of Choice" plan that would have allowed each student to choose a school worked well for me, as I had chosen a different predominantly white high school from the one I would have been assigned to by district. But only a few black students chose the white high schools, and no white students chose the black high school. The black students who chose the white school were people whose parents pushed them to get a better education, and I remember them as very smart kids.
The following year, the School District closed the black school under pressure from court decisions. They tried to make "Freedom of Choice" work by letting everyone choose which of the two traditionally white schools they wanted their children to attend. About 25% of the high school I attended was made up of black students none of the rest of us knew.
At the beginning of the year, our sophomore class was called to the school auditorium to nominate and elect our class officers. The black kids sat together in the back of the room -- no one told them to go to the back, they just did. They kept nominating students that none of the white students knew. Their nominees kept being voted down, and they were becoming upset about it. I leaned forward and whispered in the ears of a couple of girls sitting in front of me, "They are 25% of our class. Why shouldn't they have one class officer?" One of the girls answered, "They keep nominating people nobody knows."
It was my idea: Why don't we nominate one of the black kids who were here last year, who we think the white kids would be willing to elect? The other girls came up with a name of a boy. I didn't know him. We started raising our hands to nominate him. The teacher taking nominations knew we were up to something and wouldn't call on us. One of the girls snuck behind the back row with her head down, crawling over to the other side of the room. There, she raised her hand, was called on, and the white girl nominated the black boy for the last office to be filled. I remember hearing the reaction from the black kids in the back more than the reaction from the white kids in the front of the room. The teacher said, "The nominations are closed. Go back to your classrooms. We'll vote on this later."
He was elected. The white parents had started phoning each other and telling their children that they had to do it, they had to elect him, or there was going to be trouble.
Later that year, he was shot -- at least, I think it was the same boy -- in a hunting accident. As I say, I didn't know him. There was no possibility of foul play. He was accidentally shot on a hunting trip with a friend. The school was dismissed early so that everyone could go to his funeral, a funeral in a black church, a grief-stricken community.
Back then, I had a ride from school each afternoon with 3 teachers to my mother's office, where I did my homework until she finished her day. One of the teachers was a black home economics teacher, and the others were my white French and biology teachers. The three teachers went to the funeral together, so I would have gone to the funeral even if I had not chosen to do so on my own. I felt sympathy for the black school teacher who was sitting with four white people in that emotional funeral. That young boy had been well liked. Cheer leaders were crying. However, one other teacher, not knowing who had brought me there and really not knowing me at all, remarked to me snippily after the funeral that it was too bad the student who had died had not had as many friends while he was alive as he had when everyone could get out of school early to go to his funeral! I don't think I said anything. I never really learned a lot of southern manners before I left the south, but I partly mastered the skill of pretending not to have heard rude remarks.
Then the School District changed the integration plan again under another court order, zoning everybody. As far as I could tell, it mostly moved a few people from the predominantly white school they had wanted to attend to the predominantly white school that was their second choice without really doing much to change the percentage of either race at either school. I was one of the people moved, and I was white. I was to have been the editor of a new student newspaper at my old school if I had been able to stay there, and I settled for being on the newspaper staff at the new school. I had been chosen for the gymnastics team at my old school, and the new school didn't have a gymnastics team. A year later, the school distrct made a new exception so that someone could ask for a particular school if they had an opportunity there that could not be matched at the other school, but that was too late to work for me. I stayed where I was and graduated from the school where I was zoned.
Thinking of going to Berkeley to study political science, I heard stereotypical things from people in Alabama, with few exceptions. My mother looked through the university catalog and talked about going with me, possibly working on a doctorate in psychology.
I watched student protests over the Vietnam War on the evening news, including the last of the truly difficult events during the academic year before I got there. Police fired stun guns at students. A helicopter at one point swooped down around the campus buildings, angering some of the professors, even some of those thought most conservative. The campus was actually closed at one point because it became too dangerous. My mother was not sure what she was watching, and I was concerned about how she would react if something like that happened the next year while I was there. Then Billy Graham was on TV saying that Berkeley, which had been the center of the student protest movement, was now the center of the Jesus movement. From then on, I really could not convince my mother that I was going to a dangerous place.
Other people in the community tried to talk her out of allowing it, but to no avail. My mother died near the end of my senior year in high school, but the application papers to Berkeley had already gone out, and the acceptance letter came about a week after her death.
The last of the big protests ended the year before my freshman year at Berkeley. I never did see much of an anti-war protest during my years there. I heard stories about them from older students. There were dance students hiding behind the large Grecian urns at the women's gym when a mob came through. There was a staff member from Campus Crusade for Christ who was eating a peanut butter sandwich on Sproul Plaza when a mob of protesters came through followed by police with teargas, and she was left sitting there wondering if it was still safe to eat the sandwich. All of that was before my time.
The civil rights protests of the 1960's had ended, and the student anti-war protests that had borrowed many of their techniques were ending as anti-war sentiment became the predominant American view. I remember being on the Berkeley Campus when the headlines read that President Nixon had negotiated an end to the war. I was walking across the Berkeley campus at noon that day when the bells on the Campanile played "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." And there wasn't anywhere else that I would have rather been on earth on that particular day.
One year in December, three different Christian student organizations came up with the idea of getting on the steps of Sproul Plaza, where the "free speech" platform was, and singing Christmas carols. A couple of people told me there was going to be a Christian protest, and I said, "Oh no!" Then they laughed and said we were just going to sing. We went up there at noon and sang Christmas carols for an hour, and everybody loved it. That's about as radical as I ever got at Berkeley.
The stereotypes of Alabama that I found at Berkeley were just as inaccurate as the stereotypes of Berkeley that I had found in Alabama. To paint Alabama in the 1960's as all racist, or to paint Berkeley in the 1970's as all radical, would be taking too wide of a brush. It was a complicated time in our nation's history. As memories fade with time, and it seems perhaps worthwhile to write down a few of those memories that might differ from what is most commonly found in the history books, these few events are the ones that most quickly come to mind today, on the birthday of the civil rights leader who once chose to take the lead in a black church in Alabama in order to make a difference.
: murals at 
